Philip Reeve - Predator's gold

It was night again by the time she reached the air-harbour, and snowflakes were fluttering around the landing-lights at the harbour mouth. The noise of raucous laughter and cheap music drifted from taverns behind the docking pans, gusting louder whenever someone opened a door. Dim lamplight made puddles of shadow under the big, moored traders; ships with northern names, the Fram and the Froud and the Smaug. She began to feel nervous as she walked towards the low-rent docking pan where the Jenny waited. This was a dangerous city, and she had lost the habit of being alone.

“Miss Shaw?” The man surprised her, coming up on her blind side. She reached for her knife, then recognized the nice old merchant who had helped her earlier. “I’ll walk you to your ship, Miss Shaw. There are some Snowmad traders aboard; ruffianly types. It’s not safe for a young woman alone. Your vessel’s the Jenny Haniver, isn’t she?”

“That’s right,” said Hester, wondering how he knew her name and that of her ship. She supposed he must have asked around earlier, or looked it up in the new-arrivals ledger at the harbour office.

“You’ve seen Masgard then?” her new friend asked. “I suppose that has something to do with this sudden move to the west? You’ve sold him a town?”

Hester nodded.

“I’m in a similar line of work myself,” the merchant said, and slammed her against a metal stanchion beneath a trader called the Temporary Blip. She gasped, hurt and surprised, trying to gulp in enough air to scream for help. Something stung the side of her neck like a hornet. The merchant stepped away from her, breathing hard. A brass syringe flashed in the light from the distant taverns as he slid it back into his pocket.

Hester tried to put her hand to her neck, but the drug was taking effect quickly and her limbs no longer obeyed her. She tried to call out, but all that emerged was a wordless hoot. She took a step forward and fell, her face a few inches from the man’s boots. “Terribly sorry,” she heard him say, his voice wavery and far away, like Tom’s voice the last time she heard it, seeping out of the telephone in the Aakiuqs’ parlour. “I have five wives to support, you see, and they all have expensive tastes, and nag me something rotten.”

Hester hooted again, dribbling on to the deckplate.

“Don’t worry!” the voice went on. “I’m just taking you and your ship down to Rogues’ Roost. You’re wanted for questioning. That’s all.”

“But Tom — ” Hester managed to moan.

More boots appeared: expensive, fashionable, ladies’ boots, with tassels. New voices babbled overhead. “You’re sure it’s her, Blinkoe?”

“Eugh! She’s so ugly!”

“She can’t be worth anything to anyone!”

“Ten thousand in cash when I get her to the Roost,” said Blinkoe smugly. “I’ll take her there aboard her own ship, and tow the Blip ’s tender to bring me home again. Be back in no time, with bags full of money. Look after the shop while I’m gone, dears.”

“No!” Hester tried to say, because if he took her away she wouldn’t be there to rescue Tom; he would be eaten along with the rest of Anchorage and all her schemes would come to nothing… But although she tried to struggle as they rummaged for her keys she could not move or make a sound or even blink. It took her a long time to lose consciousness, however, and that was the worst of it, for she understood everything that was happening as the merchant and his wives dragged her aboard the Jenny Haniver and began the preparations for take-off.

Ice-water woke her: a storm of it, driving her sideways across a cold stone floor and thrusting her against a wall of white tiles. She gasped and screamed and gurgled. Water filled her mouth. Water plastered draggled hair across her face so that she couldn’t see, and when she raked it aside there was not much to see anyway, only a chill white room lit by a single argon-globe, and men in white uniforms aiming hosepipes at her.

“Enough!” shouted a female voice, and the storm ceased, the men turning away to hook the hoses’ dribbling snouts over a metal frame bolted to the wall. Hester choked and cursed and spewed water out on to the floor, where it swirled away into a central drain. Dim flickers of memory came back to her, of Arkangel, and a merchant: of surfacing from sleep in the cold, rattly hold of the Jenny and finding that she was tied up. She had struggled and tried to shout, and the merchant had come, all apologetic, and there had been that hornet-sting on her neck again, and darkness. He had drugged her and kept her drugged, and while she was under he had flown her from Arkangel to whatever this place was…

“Tom!” she moaned.

Booted feet came sloshing towards her. She looked up snarling, expecting the merchant, but this wasn’t him. This was a young woman in white, with a bronze badge on her breast that marked her out as a subaltern in the Anti-Traction League, and an armband embroidered with green lightning.

“Dress her,” barked the subaltern, and the men dragged Hester upright by her wet hair. They didn’t bother towelling her, just forced her weak limbs into the arms and legs of a shapeless grey overall. Hester could barely stand, let alone resist. They pushed her barefoot out of the shower-room and along a dank corridor, the subaltern leading the way. There were posters on the walls with pictures of airships attacking cities and handsome young men and women in white uniforms gazing at a sunrise beyond a green hill. Other soldiers passed, their boots loud under the low roof. Most were not much older than Hester, but all wore swords at their sides, and lightning-bolt armbands, and the shiny, smug expressions of people who know they are right.

At the end of the passage was a metal door, and behind the door was a cell; a tall, narrow tomb of a room with a single window very high up. Heat-ducts snaked across the crumbling concrete ceiling, but gave out no warmth. Hester shivered, drying slowly in her scratchy overalls. Someone flung a heavy coat at her and she realized that it was her own, and pulled it on gratefully. “Where are the rest?” she asked, and had trouble making them understand, what with her teeth chattering and the after-effects of the merchant’s drugs numbing her already-clumsy mouth. “The rest of my clothes?”

“Boots,” said the subaltern, taking them from one of her men and throwing them at Hester. “The rest we burned. Don’t worry, barbarian: you won’t need them again.”

The door closed; a key turned in the lock; booted feet marched away. Hester could hear the sea somewhere far below, hissing and sighing against a stony shore. She hugged herself against the cold and started to cry. Not for herself, or even for Tom, but for her burned clothes; her waistcoat with Tom’s photograph in the pocket, and the dear red scarf he had bought for her in Peripatetiapolis. Now she had nothing left of him at all.

The darkness beyond the high, small window faded slowly to a washed-out grey. The door rattled and opened and a man looked in and said, “Up, barbarian: the commander’s waiting.”

The commander was waiting in a big, clean room where the vague forms of dolphins and sea-nymphs showed faintly through the whitewash on the walls and a circular window looked out over a cheese-grater sea. She sat behind her big steel desk, brown fingers drumming out manic little patterns on a manilla folder. She stood up only when Hester’s guards saluted. “You may leave us,” she told them.

“But Commander — ” said one.

“I think I can handle one scrawny barbarian.” She waited till they were gone, then came slowly around the desk, staring at Hester the whole way.